By Bill Tumas:
While many people view it as an aesthetic mod, for me, hood pins are all about function. The main job of the hood pin is to keep the hood closed in case of a hood latch failure. If the hood latch were to fail, the hood can flip up causing massive damage to your Mustang, also blocking the driver's view, which can create a very dangerous situation. This Rousch 427R is being set up for high speed track duty, making it the perfect candidate for some of these Scott Drake billet hood pins. Today, we're going to show you how to install them.

Just because they're meant to be functional, doesn't mean they can't look great as well. The Scott Drake kit includes these billet aluminum plates, stainless steel linchpins, and stainless steel hood pins as well. The complete kit is designed to fit all 2005 through 2009 Mustangs.

The Scott Drake kit includes brackets to mount the hood pins to your radiator support. To get to the place where we mount the bracket, we first have to remove the cover. The radiator support cover is held on by six of these little push pins here. To remove them, you want to pull up on the center of the pin, and then slide it out. Now, we'll remove the cover and set it aside.

Now, we're going to install the support brackets for the hood pins. They're going to bolt underneath our radiator brackets here. You want to make sure when it's installed it's going to be like this with it pointing towards the outside. Both brackets will have an "L" on them for the left side, that's going to be correct for that side facing up and you simply flip it over for the other side.

Lift up and slide the bracket underneath. Line up the holes and reinstall our hardware. You don't want to tighten it down all the way yet, just get it snug. Now you want line up the bracket with the outside edge of the support bracket for the radiator, and then we'll tighten them down. Now, do the same thing on the other side.

There we have installed both pins so we can mark our hood. We want to thread it about half way down. Don't get them too tight; just get them tight enough so they're not going to move. Now, I want to use a Sharpie just to mark the tip of our hood pin. Since they're stainless steel, they'll clean up real easily when we're done. We'll close the hood so it touches the hood pins. A quick press to mark it, and you can see where it left a little mark on our hood; that's where we're going to drill our pilot hole.

Now, we're ready to drill out pilot holes. This is probably the most difficult part of the installation of the hood pins. Not that it's difficult to drill the hole, but you're drilling a hole in your Mustang's hood so you want to be careful of what you're doing. You want to make sure the drill is at the same angle the pins going to through. You don't want to go straight up. You want to stay kind of at the same angle it's going to be when the hood is closed.

Next, we'll remove the hood pins before we drill the main holes. Now, we'll have to open up this hole to 3/4 of an inch. You want to start by opening it up from the top, but you'll have to probably have to open it up from the bottom as well. We'll put some tape around the areas to protect the paint. Now we're going to open up the hole from the bottom. Now, we'll test fit our pin and we're good.

You want to get the pin as close to perfectly centered in the hole as possible. It doesn't have to be dead center because the plate will take up the gap. But you want to get it close enough that there's no contact between the hood and the pin when closing your hood. Once you have them there, you can tighten them up and we're ready to install our plates.

You want to make the sure the hole is facing it crossways and then we're going to make them snug; we don't want to get them real tight yet because we still have to adjust for the plate height. Now, you want lay this seal and then the bushing and the plate, the oval towards the front. I'm going to lay the plate on top. Now, you want to grab your linchpin, see if it goes across. Okay, the height is perfect on that one. We can go back and tighten it down. You want to repeat the process on the other side.

Now, you can see over on the other side the linchpin won't go all the way through because the pins not up high enough. We'll have to loosen it up and thread it up once; go one thread further out and tighten it down. Once you have them adjusted, then you can tighten them down.

Now, we're ready to screw down the plates. You want to start by putting the seal over the pin. Then we're going to install the plate and the bushing. Make sure everything's lined up and then you'll install the pin to hold it in place. I recommend wrapping some tape around the drill bit to make sure you don't damage the billet when drilling the holes. Once we drill the first two holes we install two screws to make sure everything lines up. We're going to get these barely snugged; do not over tighten them. You can strip the aluminum hood very easily. Now I'll drill the last two, and we're ready to attach our lanyards.

Now, we need to attach the lanyards to the radiator support. The lanyard usually goes through the edge of the grill here. I usually like to put them on this flat spot right on the front edge of the radiator support. You can use a rivet or you can use a small screw to hold it in place.

The last part of the process is to cut the radiator support cover for your hood pins. If you don't feel comfortable cutting this, we do sell them precut. Scott Drake does provide a template, though, if you are going to cut it yourself. Line it up with the crease and with the edge of our radiator cover.

Now, we're ready to cut it out. Now, we use our sanding Dremel and clean it up a little bit. We'll reinstall our radiator support cover. We'll reinstall the plastic clips, push it into the hole and then push down the center and our installation's finished.

While hood pins may not be for everyone, if you need a set for your Mustang, it's tough to beat the look of the Scott Drake billet pins. You want to take your time with the installation, since you are drilling holes in your hood as well as cutting your radiator support cover. Figure out about two hours total, you'll be back on the road in no time.